An overall finish of 14th place at Kiel Week awarded us our first 49erFX racing in gold fleet and has left us hungry for more. After a cancelled day one due to no wind, four qualifying races meant the fleet split into finals fleets early, leaving the top 25 boats battling it out in the remaining races.
Kieler Woche (Kiel Week) is in its 141st year, and is one of the largest sailing events in the world. This year, more than 70 49erFX teams competed in three fleets - our biggest regatta yet!
If you’ve read our previous blogs, you’ll know we are putting a lot of focus on our start positioning and technique. This regatta we continued to build on our starting skills after identifying more room for improvement in the training pre-Kiel week. While we had two successful starts on day one, the other two we weren’t in strong enough positions to accelerate and hold our first lane of choice, forcing us to play a bit of catch up. But, we had done enough to score 11, 8, 3 and 8 in the opening round to make the gold fleet cut off sitting in 22nd.
We were thrilled to make our first gold fleet! It showed us our mentality of striving for development in all areas of our campaign is putting us on the right track.
For our first day of racing in gold fleet, we were met with a seabreeze of 10-18 knots and sunny conditions, ideal for the racing live stream going back to our friends and family at home the opportunity to watch us in action! Racing in the gold fleet brings another style of racing out for everyone, as there are less opportunities to bounce up the leaderboard as all teams are on their game. It was a seesaw day for us, as we worked our way up and down the scorecard with 9, 15, 23 and 6, jumping up to 13th overall. While we were able to sail to the first rounding mark in the top 5 consistently, a penalty turn or error of judgement put us further back in the pack as the race continued, the costly mistakes of learning!
If you’ve watched the tracking, as we did during our post-race debrief, you’d notice we were sailing very fast upwind (possibly one of the fastest in the fleet), however we sailed a lot more distance than our competitors. We learnt more about our moding and speed upwind, and as there are two ways to win a race, either sail faster or sail less distance, we’re working on finding the right balance of that equation in our next events!
We had long days during Kiel week, as we shared the race courses with the men’s 49er fleets in either the morning or afternoon shifts throughout the day. After a long wait onshore on the last day of series racing, we finally launched at around 4:30pm for two races in 3-6 knots. We didn’t get the position we needed off the start in the first race, losing our upwind lane we had to tack out to the right. It was a great opportunity to practice our moding upwind in the marginal trapezing conditions - not our most favourable sailing environment. Placing 15th in the first race, we knew time was running out to make up the points needed to make the medal race. After a solid start in the final race, the dying seabreeze left holes of no pressure on the course, of which we got stuck in on the first downwind. Though there were glimpses of us having enough points to make the top 10, we slipped down the ranking to finish the race in 11th and miss the medal race by just five points.
While Kiel Week was extremely exciting for us to make our first gold fleet, we also can’t help but think about the points we left out on the race course that meant we missed the chance to compete in the medal race. Nevertheless, we have another chance coming up very soon with the European Championships in Aarhus, Denmark starting on July 5th! We’ll be on the water training there for a few days before we measure and weigh our boat in for our first major class championship, with 75 female sailing teams competing in the 49erFX.
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Key Takeaways:
Gold fleet brings a new style of racing, where the points are extremely tight when it comes to the cutoffs.
Our moding choices need to be more relative to the fleet, so we can sail the VMG modes (speed in the right direction) needed when the fleet is compressed.
Consistency in terminology used to communicate during race becomes more important when fatigued on long days.
Timing and technique for acceleration are needing improvement (especially in 3-8 knots).
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